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'1 think rm going to like what I think rm going
to get to know about Powell"
.
the poster. "Showgirls" is not about sex
at all; it is about the business of sex,
which is a different matter.
Mind you, what a business! The
plot promotes Nomi from the Cheetah
to the Stardust, where her Fonteyn-
like skills soon threaten the crown of
Cristal (Gina Gershon), the star attrac-
tion. Here's the twist: Cristal both fears
and fancies Nomi, inviting her out to
lunch and announcing, "I like nice tits.
I always have." Nomi strikes back, as
sharp as a tack. "I like having them,"
she says, as if they were friends who
occasionally come to visit. But can the
art of dance survive their love-hate
pact? As the owner of the Stardust
says, "The show must go on. The
Stardust will never be dark-never has
been. Not while I'm alive." These
fresh, new-minted phrases spring from
the script of Joe Eszterhas, who
worked with Verhoeven on "Basic In-
stinct." By now, it is possible to trace a
rough map of their common interests:
chicks with weapons, chicks with
chicks, and chicks. Between them,
Eszterhas and Verhoeven make it
abundantly clear that the title of their
new movie is not so much a noun as an
imperative. They have a story to tell,
.
even a moral to expound, but their
deepest wish is to get the girls to show.
When Tony (Alan Rachins), who runs
the dances at the Stardust, auditions a
line of hopefuls, picks three, says
"Show me your tits," and hands one of
them a helpful cluster of ice cubes, he
is acting on behalf of the entire film.
(I'm sure that the auditions for
"Showgirls" itself were, of course, con-
ducted in a spirit of absolute profes-
sionalism and deep respect.)
For the most part, this movie is a
b\ank-a waxwork museum with mov-
ing parts. But I did find something
rather touching, in the emotional
rather than the lap-dancing sense, in
Elizabeth Berkley. She can't act, but
the sight of her trying to act, doing the
sorts of things that acting is rumored to
consist of, struck me as a far nobler
struggle than the boring old I-know- 1-
can-make-it endeavors of her fictional
character. She must have been told at
the outset that Nomi is supposed to be
a driven woman, because she takes care
to invest the most fleeting of actions
with a Joan Crawford intensity; the
simple act of shaking a ketchup bottle,
for instance, is modelled on the jack-
hammer technique of a road crew.
THE NEW YORKER., OCTOBER. 9, 1995
"Showgirls" requires that Berkley spend
at least half her time topless, and it
could be argued, in the interest not
of prurience but of pure dramatic
method, that her breasts are more
expressive than her face. Looking
closely at her mouth, I saw to my sur-
prise that even her lipstick was wearing
lipstick, and the sheer weight of
Revlon, or whatever, seems to restrict
the free play of her feelings from the
neck up.
The crucial question is: Should we
pay this ridiculous movie the honor of
being offended by it? I am not sure
that I can be bothered to work up the
steam. I would be more troubled by its
depiction of women if I thought that
any care had been lavished on its de-
piction of men; you can't accuse a
movie of degrading half of humanity
when it forgets to grade humanity in
the first place. I have cordially loathed
all of Verhoeven's earlier pictures, but
this was the first one that I didn't ob-
ject to. "Showgirls" unveils more flesh
than "Basic Instinct" did, but it's less
explicit in its cynicism: Verhoeven
doesn't prod us into ogling, because--
and this is bliss-his movie likes to
suggest that all these bare-assed boys
and girls and all these swirling, nipple-
raising, ice-and-fire routines at the
Stardust are really rather classy. There
is not a whisper of satire in this picture;
it ambles along like a two-and-a-quar-
ter-hour special edition of "Models
Inc.," which may be why people were
laughing so hard in the theatre. The
language may be rougher than any-
thing on TV, but after a while the nu-
dity grows as humdrum as a suit. You
sit there ready to be shocked, primed
for the practically hard-core, and find
yourself skidding on soap. Here's the
dirty little secret of this movie: it's good
clean fun.
I AM not convinced that the grant-
ing of an NC-17 rating to "Show-
girls" was correct. My advice would
have been that the film should not
be shown to people over seventeen. It
is ideally designed to sate and there-
by disarm the predilections of teen-
agers, who might otherwise channel
their lusts into anti-social behavior,
such as burglary or theatre work-
shops. Meanwhile, Kathryn Bigelow's
"Strange Days" is merely rated R. It is